WASHINGTON – The White House yesterday defended the first couple’s jet-setting ways and three overseas trips last year that cost taxpayers $72 million.

A government analysis, ordered by three Republican senators, showed one of the Clintons’ trips – to Africa in March of last year – included an entourage of 1,300 officials, guests and aides and cost almost $43 million.

“The president believes it’s money well-spent,” said White House spokesman Joe Lockhart, insisting the costs were no different under Reagan-Bush.

“We are the lone remaining superpower in the world. The president needs the ability to handle any crisis, any time, anywhere. That comes at a cost,” Lockhart said.

He described the Africa tour, in which the president apologized for slavery, as “ground-breaking” and the first of its kind for a U.S. president.

But the GOP senators claimed the money spent on the trips, most of it coming out of the Pentagon’s budget, was “ludicrous.”

“It seems to me that’s an awful high price tag to pay for an apology,” said Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho).

The first lady also has come under fire for her taxpayer-subsidized trips on military jets to New York this year.

The report by the Government Accounting Office, an arm of Congress, shows that the 11-day, six-nation Africa trip included 13 military helicopters which required construction of special dome shelters to house them on the ground.

Air Force One and five other planes carried the advance team and the official delegation, which included 16 members of Congress.

A trip to Chile the next month, where the Clintons attended the second Summit of the Americas, cost $10 million.

And the tab for a five-city, nine-day trip to China two months later – in which the president assured Beijing that the United States opposed independence for Taiwan and called the Tiananmen Square massacre “wrong” – was about $19 million.